Ding-dong, the Kindle's dead

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I bought Joi a Kindle 2 for her birthday.  She was a little ambivalent at first, but gradually seemed to be warming to the idea, and was looking forward to using it on our 10th Anniversary vacation.  We bought a nice faux leather case for it, and she loaded it up with a bunch of books including historical volumes about French Polynesia and its peoples.

Joi enjoyed showing it off to folks while we were in Australia, and was really looking forward to using it while lazing on the beach on Moorea, so you can imagine her (indeed, our) disappointment when we opened the case and discovered this:
Photo_042809_001.jpg

Dead as a doornail; bleedin' demised; hopped the twig and joined the choir invisible; ...you get the idea.

A bit of web surfing found the procedure to "hard reset" the Kindle (disconnect external power and hold the power slider for 30 seconds), but nothing could resurrect it.  Further surfing suggested that this was not an isolated problem, but that Amazon support would ship a replacement without question.  However, I didn't think they'd likely ship one to the South Pacific, and even if they did, there was no Whispernet coverage to reload Joi's books onto a replacement, so we sadly buried the Kindle back in our suitcase and waited until we got back home to call it in.

So on Monday I called Amazon support, and after a few minutes on hold I got a support rep who seemed somewhat unsurprised when I told him the symptoms, and arranged for a replacement to be overnighted to us, along with a return shipping label for the dead unit.  I asked him if this was a common problem, and whether it had been resolved or if the replacement was likely to suffer the same fate - he would/could only say that there had been "less than one percent" that had had this problem, but could not give me any details whether it was limited to early production models.

So I guess we'll see.  The replacement will be here Wednesday (called too late to catch the Monday shipment cutoff), and we'll reload Joi's books from her archive.  Of course, now that we're back in the rat race, it may be some time before she finds another opportunity to sit down and spend any decent amount of time with it.

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It just occurred to me that I failed to update on the status of Joi's prematurely-demised Kindle.  True to their word, a replacement arrived later that week without any questions asked.  It took but a few minutes to unpack it... Read More

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This page contains a single entry by Jon published on April 28, 2009 9:22 AM.

Russian and US satellites collide - doesn't power give way to sail? was the previous entry in this blog.

The Kindle is dead! Long live the Kindle! is the next entry in this blog.

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